Can you turn off comments on Facebook ads?

Where the setting is

If your ad account has the feature, it sits at the ad level in Ads Manager:

1. 1Open Meta Ads Manager and go to the Campaigns tab.
2. 2Find the ad (not the campaign or ad set) and click Edit.
3. 3Scroll to the engagement or Comment Controls section. The label varies slightly between accounts.
4. 4Choose who can comment: everyone, a limited audience, or nobody ("Turn off comments"). Confirm and publish.

Why you might not see it

Comment Controls is still rolling out and does not cover every ad format or placement. If the section is not there, your account has not received it yet, and there is no way to request it. Ads created from an existing page post follow the post's own comment settings instead.

For organic page posts the older controls still apply: in the page's settings you can limit who can comment on public posts (everyone, profiles and pages you follow, or only you).

Why turning comments off usually costs you

• Social proof disappears. An ad with fifty comments asking about sizes and shipping sells better than the same ad with no comments. People read comments before they read your copy.
• Questions are buying signals. "Do you ship to Italy?" is a customer with their wallet out. With comments off, that question is never asked and the sale never happens.
• Engagement feeds delivery. Meta's auction rewards ads people interact with. Comments are interaction.
• It looks like you have something to hide. An ad with comments turned off reads, to a careful buyer, like a store with the reviews removed.

When turning them off is the right call

There are cases. Regulated products where any public reply is a compliance risk. Ads aimed at a market where you cannot moderate in the local language at all. A short campaign that attracted coordinated abuse. Even then, consider hiding everything instead of turning comments off: the comment box stays open, people can still write to you, and you answer in private.

The middle ground: moderate instead

Automatic moderation keeps the comments that help you and removes the ones that hurt you, without you watching the ad all day. In practice that means three layers:

• Pattern rules for the obvious noise: links, contact details, mentions, hashtag piles, emoji floods, image-only comments, your own keyword list.
• AI judgement for tone: hide attacks, scams and competitor plugs; keep questions, praise and honest complaints so you can answer them.
• A "hide everything, reply privately" mode for campaigns where you want the box open but the thread quiet. The public sees a clean ad; every commenter gets your answer in a message.

What hidden comments look like to people

A hidden comment is still visible to its author and their friends. Nobody else sees it. The author is not notified. That is why hiding is the tool moderators prefer: it removes the damage without starting an argument. Deleting, by contrast, is visible to the author and often provokes a second, angrier comment.